Steven Read's adventures as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the Canada Edmonton Mission.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Welcome back to Edmonton!

Hey family,

This week has been sweet! Haha sorry if I wasn't clear, but I got transferred to the Londonderry Ward, which is on the north end of Edmonton. I wrote Edmonton North District in my last email, but it's the Edmonton North Zone haha. Sorry for the confusion. Spruce Grove is in our zone, but no I'm not in Spruce Grove again. I wish :) My companion is Elder Penrod and we probably get along too well haha if you can imagine. I was in the MTC with him and we've been close our whole missions so it's been sweet serving with him! We have a lot of fun.

Londonderry is sweet! The ward is awesome and they love the missionaries! I love members that love me. Haha. The north side of Edmonton is nothing like the south end was. There are way more black people, whereas Southwood had a bunch of East-Indians. It's a huge area too, we cover part of downtown, which is a complete gong show haha. I think I prefer the smaller-city scene, but it's still a lot of fun. We exchange with all of the district leaders throughout the transfer, which is actually pretty sweet because we go up to Fort McMurray, 5 hours north, for two days, then this Friday we're going to St. Paul which is about 2 hours to the northeast, for two days. They're both too far away to drive there and back in one day so we just go up and blitz the area with them. I'm way psyched to go up that far! I'm also going back to Spruce next week :) We're going on exchanges with the Assistants tomorrow and I'll be with Elder Paulson, who was my zone leader in Red Deer before he went up the ladder :) It'll be fun I love exchanges. I always feel like I learn something, regardless of who I'm with.

I feel like we're always busy though! There's so much random stuff that we have to do. But it's good. Plus our ward mission leader is this super-analytical business man so he makes us write out what we teach investigators, what we talk about before and after the lesson, how they respond, etc. He's pretty effective, but it's time-consuming! Our Pdays apparently take forever too because we have to drive into the office, grab mail, report numbers, etc.

We have investigators! Ahh you have no idea how nice it is haha it's been too long. We're teaching a girl named Maggie, she's from China and came here about 7 months ago. She had no concept of who God was, and in the month and a half that she's been taught, she's developed a super strong faith in Christ it's awesome. She's on date for November 3rd and is doing really well. We have other investigators, but we haven't been able to meet with them since I've been here.

Yeah the Calgary Temple Dedication is this Sunday! I'm so excited. They're broadcasting it all around Alberta. Pretty exciting!

Hey so I requested a transcript from Aloha and told them to send it up here if they could, but if not to just send it home. When it gets there can you just ship it up here? I need it to fill out some stuff on the application.

Mom you had poutine that's sweet! To tell you the truth I'm not the biggest fan of it but I won't turn it down :) Your trip sounds legit! I want to go to all of the church history stuff some day. It would be a sweet mission to serve!